In recent years, much attention has been paid to the need of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and One-to-One marketing. This is because decreases in the lifetimes of products result from an increase in the number of product types and because customers' orientation toward customized services attributed to the prevalence of the Internet. The above techniques are very effective in accomplishing objects to improve customers' satisfaction and to get and hold new customers.
One-to-One marketing is a kind of database marketing in which customers' individual attribute information such as ages, sexes, habits, tastes, and purchase histories is stored in a database so that the contents of the information can be analyzed to make proposals meeting the customers' needs. A representative technique for one-to-one marketing is variable print. With the recent development of the DTP (Desk Top Publishing) technique and prevalence of digital printing apparatuses, a variable print system has been developed which outputs a customized document for each customer. It has thus become necessary to optimally lay out contents the amount of which varies with customers.
In general, when such a customized document is created using a variable print system, containers are laid out on the document. The container is an object that is a partial region (sometimes referred to as a field region) in which contents (drawn contents) from the database are drawn. That is, a customized document is created by laying out containers and associating the database with the containers (associating the contents of the database with the containers).
However, with the variable print system, the sizes of containers for texts and images are fixed. Accordingly, when data from the database is inserted into a container, if the amount of data is larger than the size of the container, text overlapping or image clipping may occur. If the data amount is smaller than the container size, a gap may disadvantageously be formed in the container.
To solve this problem, an automatic layout system has been proposed. The automatic layout system dynamically changes the layout of containers using contents. The automatic layout system can set a flexible container size according to the amount of data in an inserted text or image.
Specifically, the automatic layout system can vary the size of containers and increase the size of containers to be laid out according to the amount of data inserted. For texts, the automatic layout system can vary the sizes of fonts in containers and reduce the size of the font to be laid out according to the amount of data inserted. Thus, even if a text having a data amount exceeding the capacity of a container is inserted into the container, the entire text can be displayed in the container.
However, with the flexible container size, a container with a large data amount may be laid on top of another container on the same document. In other cases, when the sizes of containers are fixed with the sizes of fonts varied, a text with a large data amount may result in an excessively reduced font size in the layout.
Thus, the automatic layout system comprises a link function for associating adjacent containers with each other (function for associating adjacent objects so that the layout of an object obtained by pouring data into the objects is based on the layout of another object adjacent to this object). This solves the above problem by automatically increasing the size of a container adjacent to a particular container of an increased size (see, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-129658).
However, with the automatic layout system, when a plurality of containers are arranged on a document and associated with one another, a user must manually set each link between the corresponding containers. However, with the one-to-one marketing, catalogs or pamphlets are created according to clients' needs, so that much information is required for some clients. It is thus expected that the number of links associating containers with one another increases consistently with the number of containers into which contents are poured. In this case, an increase in setting burden may disadvantageously result from the manual setting of each link associating containers with one another as with the above technique.